- July 15, 2014
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How to Make Your Pre-headers Better (and Other Top Email Marketing Tips)
Email marketing continues to be the small business marketer’s go-to tool. Recent studies reveal that, on average, SMBs are dedicating up to 20 percent of their marketing dollars on email, more than any other tactic. Why? Because the pickins are good: Some reports have pegged mobile email open rates at a whopping 48 percent.
But deliverability, screen-sizing and other issues have made the practice more difficult to master, says Chief Marketer Magazine (CMM) in its 2014 “Inbox Confidential.” To help get you over these humps, the report recommends being intentional in these key areas:
Fixing Pre-headers and Subject Lines
Email subject lines, of course, tell readers what’s inside. In mobile, the pre-header comes after the subject line and comprises the 85 or so characters users see when previewing your message. Experts like Andrew King of Lyris recommend writing the two in tandem to fully leverage this potent one-two combination.
“Good pre-header text can make your [message] more relevant and actually extend your email subject line,” King says. Since many marketers don’t intentionally craft pre-headers, the competitive advantage falls to those who do.
(And speaking of message crafting, check out these tips for supercharging email subject lines or using triggers to respond to recipients’ actions.)
Improving Deliverability and Engagement
One way to improve results over time is by separating your inactive users from the actives. Segregate and send separately to those who haven’t been responding; put them into less frequent broadcast patterns, such as semi-monthly or quarterly. This will also help your emailer “reputation.”
In case you weren’t aware, Internet service providers (ISPs) are busy behind the scenes discerning email quality (spam or not), using open rates, click-throughs and other engagement signals as a kind of reputational quality measure.
In simple terms, active users help you and indifferent users don’t. “Having a third or half of your list inactive for six months to a year, is a recipe for disaster,” says Chad White, principal of research at ExactTarget. The solution? Ask IT to set up a separate IP address (they’ll know) from which to mail inactives.
Optimizing for Mobile
In addition to segregating inactives and pumping up pre-headers, marketers must also optimize messages for mobile delivery. We’ve been banging the drum for responsive website design. But the concept of ensuring readability on any device or screen size especially applies to email. Mobile open rates may soon overtake desktop, so to avoid being left behind, make your campaigns mobile friendly.
Use Video Best Practices
Integrated marketers know that embedding video in email can help goose click-through and open rates. But, as the CMM report reminds, there are some important dos and don’ts to keep in mind:
- Keep clips to under one minute
- Let users decide when to start viewing (in other words, ix-nay the auto-play)
- Hi-def is best: Encode video at the highest value to preserve image quality when users go full-screen
Despite current challenges, email marketing remains a powerful, cost-effective tool that will only get better with time. In addition to our growing repository of tips, this simple infographic may provide additional insights into mobile vs desktop email marketing.